Prof G Markets: First Time Founders with Ed Elson — ft. Eli Wachs of Footprint

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The podcast will conduct exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are shaping the face of digital advertising, so you can get the information you need without the traditional BS. Subscribe to the current at thecurrent.com or anywhere you get podcasts. This week's number 322,000. That's how many hours e-commerce companies Shopify is attempting to save by rolling out a calendar on employee calendars that shows how much each meaning costs the company. I have a corner office with a view. I'm a bus driver. Welcome to Prof. Markets. Ed, what's going on today? We've got something new for our listeners this week's got. We spend a lot of our time on this show discussing public companies, macro conditions and other big ticket stories. But we wanted to gain more insight into early stage business and investment. So the team's been working on a pilot of a new concept called First Time Founders. I've spent the last couple months speaking with entrepreneurs about their businesses and what it's like to found a company. And we've got the first of those interviews ready today with Eli Wax, the founder of Footprint, which helps people and companies store and manage personal data online. We're going to listen to this interview and then we'll come back for your reaction and perhaps you'll give us some advice for the founder. You have started nine businesses after all. So we're hoping to tap into that expertise. Okay. Last year we wrote a post on no mercy, no malice about identity, specifically online identity. Scott pointed out that the internet is one of the few places on earth where you can operate with complete anonymity. There are a few social media platforms that require you to verify your identity and on many platforms you can simply pretend to be someone else. This is largely why bots and hate speech are such an issue online. Now Scott's thesis was that this is a problem, but also a solvable problem. He believes we could fix the internet by requiring identity verification online. That's a statement many considered controversial, but also won the 80% of the US population supports. Regardless, if an internet company decided they did want to verify their customers, the question is, how would they do it? Well, I'm pleased to say today's guest is Eli Wax, whose company is answering exactly that question. Eli is the founder and CEO of Footprint, a digital identity and security tool that allows companies to onboard and verify their customers with just one click. Eli, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I was worried if I got dinner with you enough times you'd be scared to get to know me. I'm honored and thrilled you had me on. Absolutely. The dinner was sealed the deal for me. Let's just start with this. What does Footprint do? Footprint helps companies, we say onboard users, and offload the cost and risk of storing that data. What that also means is we're offloading from storing a lot of your personal information. That's what we do in a nutshell. For people, we're the last identity form they ever fill out. As you said, it'd be really tedious and burdensome with every time you went to create an account you had to fill out a long information, fill out your information, given that presumably it shouldn't change. We feel the same way, and that's what we've tried to build over here at Footprint. How did you come up with this idea? What was the inspiration? I became really interested in privacy back in 2016, around the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal. There was a lot of talk around what should privacy look like online. I actually disagreed with a lot of the sentiment. There's a lot around how do we legislate away and regulate data. I think there are a lot of people who wanted the world to look like Duck Duck Go, and look, it's a great platform, but to me, data is very powerful. There's a reason why it exists. I actually became more upset with what Google didn't do with my data than what they did with it. Google is probably one of the best predictors in the world of Google things like Parkinson's, and I know it from a recapture test for your finger tremors and your type right over time. Around that time, I'd a family member get sick and luckily got it early. I became very obsessed with this idea of figuring out how do we put people in control of their data. That's really what sent me on this path of Footprint. You mentioned Duck Duck Go. I'm not sure everyone knows what that... Can you explain what Duck Duck Go is? Yeah, it's a... Both a children's song, I believe. For this purpose, I'm bad with analogies in it. I think it's something great around the Rosie. It's a search engine which doesn't have any... It doesn't collect any data. There are no targeted advertisements. Okay, so you talk a lot about this idea of KYC. That's a big mission statement for the company, which stands for Know Your Customer. Can you give us the general picture on what KYC is and why it matters on the internet? KYC strangely stems from the Patriot Act in a way. Because it comes from almost a national defense bill, or at least the definition that we use today of it. KYC stands for Know Your Customer. Essentially, it's this idea where if you are a fintech, or if you're a bank, and if you're a fintech, you're probably using a bank. The US wants to make sure that people who have access to banking rules and be able to move money are quite a good actors. There are people who have been trusted. There are people who aren't going to be using it to launder money. They're not on any sanctions list. And that's how it started. And I think kind of a leveled down was it was seen as a way to kind of do we trust the people who are letting to use her platform. I think we've seen in the past maybe 10 to 15 years as there have been companies that have really stepped up the solve KYC. We saw them really just be a checkbox. They confirmed that the identity entered matches identity in a database. That's not really solving the real issue. Whether it's what you spoke about at the intro round, are we trusting the people who are on Twitter or real people? And it's not really solving the problem of are we trusting that my Uber driver is a trustworthy person. All we've really confirmed is that the information they used to sign up matches information in the database. And that's kind of what we saw is really wrong. To me, it's strange that companies that were verifying people also weren't fraud detection companies that seems disjointed to me. And that's what it's done. And it's led to what we say. It's really looking for like bad actors, which is inherent. Like know your Cosmer. It's like a Sherlock Holmes mystery to find the bad people. The problem is that it's never ending. There's an infinite amount of fake identities to be made. Conversely, there's a finite amount of real people. Two of us are talking right now. We know how many people live in New York. We know how many people live in this country. And what's going on for us? We're trying to make this close look ecosystem. So that we know the moment a second out of here is one of you two has to be lined because only one of you can have the identity. And once you've established that source of truth, then you can do other things without needing to fully prove that again. Yeah. I mean, when you look at the way that the entire world works, it's like your identity is crucial for literally everything you do, right? It's like, if you want to buy a car, if you want to drive a car, you got to register all of your information. Then they put it on a card and then you got to show them the card. If you want to get a drink, you have to prove that you're a certain age. If you want to buy a house, if you want to open a bank account, they have to do a credit check. They have to learn about who you are. Why is it that when the internet was built that we decided that we don't care about that so much? Why is that such a crucial part of the rest of society? And then for whatever reason on the internet, we don't like to think about identity. We don't want people to have to prove who they are. It's a really good question. And I would even extend it a step further. In the real world, you kind of describe more than a happy scenario where you're trying to rent a car for the summer or you're trying to buy a drink. There's also a scenario where I steal a car. And presumably, if I did that, I wouldn't be allowed. It would be tougher for me to step within a hundred feet of a four dealership. But the internet said there's really no repercussions. I'd say fraud's close to free. Or fraud's about 50 bucks. That's so much a cost to get like a pack of fake identity treatment cards on the park web. And that's the other thing. I'd like to say that, you know, everybody's very naive and they just didn't think about this. And the footprint team came to say that I don't think that's true. I think people have thought about this. I think that the technology hasn't really been there to be able to accommodate it. And that footprint, where are we known for bringing one click KYC, where the ability to verify yourself once and then going forward, you just use Face ID on your phone. That's only possible though if you have secure off. And pretty much the standards we tap into. It's phyto2, which comes from web off then with which out getting to nerdy. It's kind of this alliance of Google, Apple, even Microsoft. And they finally agreed to this common standard essentially of Q4 of last year. So it's not even that long that we've had it. What's interesting is the underlying protocol of web off then Google implemented it back in 2008. And at the time, Google is struggling with phishing attacks. And since they implemented it, they had no internal phishing attacks. And why that's important is that, you know, when people used to ask me about maybe like, why aren't you doing footprint on blockchain? Yeah. It's like, well, I don't want to accidentally send my identity to the wrong person. And then it doesn't really do me good that I can see who I sent it to in the ether because they have my identity. I think you actually do need a strong centralized arbiter here. Right. But you need that strong real. And that's kind of what pastries have unlocked for us in the past kind of seven months. And we do that in conjunction with some other things that enable us to kind of have that fidelity. And it's like you said, it's strange that the internet says we don't undoing monotonous tasks that we normally have to do. But identity seems to be the opposite of that. Like, there's so many things we have to prove our identity for online that we don't even think about in person. Yeah. So a few things. One, you talked about blockchain. And it feels like the whole point of blockchain or one of the key, the central points of blockchain was to remove the need for KYC, was to remove the need for basically having to trust someone like you're describing it in a transaction. Oh, you won't need to trust them because it's verified and it's on the blockchain. Now, we've sort of seen this play out. That didn't really work. There's probably no industry more fraudulent than the crypto industry. But it still raises this question of it's a shame and it's a pain and it's annoying that when you transact with someone on the internet, you have to somehow trust them. And it's easier when we transact in real life where, you know, you're face to face with someone, you look at the store owner, you pay them the cash or in any other transaction where there's maybe in banking where you feel like maybe there's some institutional credibility, you believe that the transaction is real. But you're basically saying to customers at least you can trust us. So my question would be why should customers trust you? It's a great question. So when you say customers, it could mean to people. It can mean like the businesses that we sell to and it can be fair and customers. I think that second question is one that we will never be able to fully be happy with in that. It's something we have to prove every day. I say they come to these built on trust. I publish my very long philosophical investor updates that nobody asked for. I say, you know, if you're going to trust me with your SSN, you deserve to get to know my rambling thoughts of love and light, the shadow of self. You likely won't like what you find, but I think you deserve the chance. We publish our pricing, we publish pretty in depth articles about our technology. I think it's something that we try to operate with transparency there. You know, even you can log in and you can it's not going to be that interesting. You can see which company access your data for what reason we actually find that companies like that more is like a they know everything they do will be recorded to an audit log and they like that book for accountability and for compliance reasons. But I think that's one that then on the other for why can companies trust us? You know, I guess going back to what you said start there like I feel more comfortable ruffling the crypto feathers now that like until I get up to being like a hushed voice talking about it. Me too. I feel like back into 2021 it'd be like you have to say like the password to be like this person also doesn't believe it doesn't. Now we can be more and more grateful about it. Yeah, exactly. And I think like at the end of the day, you had to understand that if you're verifying someone's identity, or as if you know it or not, experience Lexus nexus and the social security administration are probably involved. And good luck convincing those folks to start kind of theory. From the start, like it was like there wasn't a change in my opinion. And I think the second is that you have to rerun the verification each time. So we don't make KYC portable. We make PII portable. I think that's a very key distinction because we really yourself as a data operability platform. So why do companies trust us? I think it's twofold. One is that we do things which become much more valuable than just a check mark. We work with some companies where they maybe or feel like locked into like a payment processor. And they'll use footprint. We don't do KYC. We collect information. We give them a flow. They have more options of where they end up going. I think they're like the next step I go is and this may be a fun line for a podcast. And I say and I'd like to qualify this as saying this is an anti-NRA line. But I say that to steal a line that the NRA uses improperly. I'm about to use in context. This is and bank accounts don't commit fraud. People commit fraud. And that's not a lot of what is in the air. I don't like them. We need to ban them. But what I think some point is that it's kind of crazy that you know if you go and speak to ramp. Or cap chase about the fraud. It's the vast majority is like fake three person businesses. Which means it's somebody who created a fake three person business with the entrance. If you they're fascinating stories about how hotels and rental car companies. Like oftentimes like do multi-month moratoriums of shine cards. Because people will just create a chime account. They'll rent the car with the deposit and they'll pull the money in advance. ACHROT is a fascinatingly kind of easy thing to do. Because there's no repercussion. Your chime bank account gets shut down. Guess what? We're in the world of FinTech. You can create 20 more accounts the next day. What's more about footprint is we link those accounts back to the identity. We'll be right back. This podcast is supported by humans versus machines. A new series about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence with cognitive science and AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus. For all AI's progress in the last 70 years for our detection speech translation chat GPT. Do we know how to build AI we can trust? Humans versus machines digs into AI's history present and future, brings to life some of its biggest breakthroughs and failures, along with the ways we might change it. Humans versus machines with Gary Marcus is available now wherever you listen. Just before the men's world cup kicked off last year, we had footy fanatic Roger Bennett on today explained. Noel asked him, who's going to win the tournament? He said Brazil was the favorite, but I think the story going into the world cup is that of Argentina. He called it about Argentina and Leonardo Messi. That does not make me a genius. He is the single greatest footballer the world has ever seen. It was only a matter of time. But we called him back to tell him he was wrong about something else. He said America would finally become a fully realized soccer loving nation in 2026 around the time of the next men's world cup. But with the arrival of Messi, it looks like that moment's already here. God, if that makes me wrong, I'm so delighted to be wrong, Sean. Lionel Messi, weekend weekend, is creating transcendent alchemy on fields in this nation from sea to shining sea. Things are getting messy in America, and soccer is starting to look a lot like football. Hear all about it on Today Explained. Who are your clients? What kind of company wants to use footprint? Yes, I mean, companies that we've spoken about today, you spoke about renting a car. We work with a company that helps you lease cars. We work with companies that are investment companies, whether you're looking for real estate, whether you're looking for stocks, all the way through to marketplaces, which you may not even think about. They're not, even though they're facilitating payments, they're more so verifying people to establish trust of the people inside their marketplace. Because, as you said, we're transacting with people, and now we're doing things like getting in their car, staying in their home, and you probably want to, you know, make sure there was a bit of a check done. You're going to be in for as a fraud, if you end up in my apartment. You would have seen, you're going to be sad that I wasn't vetted. That's not just because of the construction going on above. And what's interesting is, we scale up and scale down. And that is a very light sentence. Let me maybe add something to it. What's going on footprint is your footprint gross. So if you sign up for a footprint to say, hey, get a credit card, you probably entered, you're like, name your date of birth, your address, your social security number. Cool. Let's say you then go to rent a car, you're going to need to spend a driver's license. When you go to do that, we're going to bypass collecting name, date of birth address, social. We're going to go right to the driver's license. And you're going to spend that. Then let's say you're going to tread socks, you need to answer like your income, your risk appetite. You're going to answer just those questions. You don't have to answer any of those things ever again. Now, let's say you then go and create just something on a marketplace where they actually don't really care about the other things. They just need to access your name, your email, your date of birth. We can do that. You'll only grant access to those three things. But with that fidelity badge, that footprints verified the rest. So that market wise, that social media company, they don't need to know that. They don't have access to it. But we've already linked that to a real person. And let's go out, footprints are technology. We know how many identities are on your device. So if you try to sign up for a second, with a second identity, that's a flag to us. And that's how we think about it. And how do you make money doing that? Who's paying you? So companies pass. If you're onboarding someone, you need to do KYC. So we get paid each time you verify someone. And then we get paid for storing the data. We're a security company. We offload that storage. We like to think that eventually we're moving KYC from like part of your customer acquisition to very small tax of the LTV of the consumer. And that we boost conversion a lot, both with trust by removing friction by increasing security. And where in the business trajectory would you say you are right now? Like how many employees do you have? How much do you think this thing can grow? Where do you hope to land in the next few years or so? We're a 15 person company today. We're about 16 months old. We've now been live for about four and a half months. We're growing pretty quickly. Double digit customers. Revenue is ramping up a good amount. We now have like our line of sight to our like first like million plus portable identities. And to me, that's always been an extremely arbitrary number. I picked as like, let's see if we can get here. I think next is the goal of, you know, to me, if we're having this chat in, you know, double the company history. Let's say we're, you know, in another 18 months. I like, I want to have one aside to 10 million portable identities. Another arbitrary number. I'm blocking out of the sky. We can't. To me, I've said, you know, obviously a lot of the appeal of openness is network effect. Yep. And I think people start from the beginning, how do you think about a cold start problem? And my honest answer has been, I don't go to bed agonizing about a cold start problem. I got a bad thing about, you know, how do we build the best onboarding experience? And how do we build the best security for data opportunity? Yeah. And that's what our goal is. We want to be like a type firm for onboarding. And we want to be like a segment for your data. And do both of those best in class. Yeah. And if we can do that, that's when I get very excited about, you know, being an identity lawyer to the internet for both businesses, what it means for them to be able to really trust the people they're running in, being an onboarding platform for all of fintechs and connect, collect all of that in just five lines of code. And then for people, you know, I think that there's a lot of long-term stuff that I get really excited about from kind of putting people in control of their identity. I think in the short term, we think footprint kind of at skill becomes like this built-in life lock as a service. And we know when somebody is trying to take your identity. I jokingly call it the dual. I've said that, you know, we'll send everybody a jousting uniform and I'll get the proof that I'm the real Eli. But it's, you know, there's billions of identity theft a year. It often happens to the elderly. It often happens to more vulnerable. That number should start going down. Like I really view it as a big failure. There are all these big companies in the space that have been operating for 10 years. And their revenue may be going up. But identity theft is also going up. Yeah, exactly. And to me, I don't really, I don't know another industry where their cardinal metric keeps going up. And they view what they're doing as success. Right. And I say that I think it's an incentive issue. I think that K.O.I.C. companies are fraud detection, not fraud prevention companies. Because when they detect fraud, they sell you more products to find more fraud. Yeah. Footprint by contrast, because we're doing the security too, we're a data-operability platform. We're an onboarding platform. We play with different incentives. And it's important because at the end of the day, we're serving people. And it's also to me by building that trust and by being open and transparent. This becomes a much more solvable numbers game. Like by the time we've done 300 million verifications, we should know who's who, not in a big state way, which is in a, like, who should be allowed to open a counts way. There are so many companies that I've done far more verifications that, but they don't know that because in a way they're not even incentivized to. Yeah. One thing that makes me think about is, I mean, early you were mentioning the idea of face ID, on our phones. And there's this big sentiment among people right now, which is, oh, don't, don't give your data over to big tech platforms. You don't, you can't trust them. But then at the same time, we are literally using our biometric identity to open up our iPhones every day. And now we're putting our credit card information into our phones. And we're uploading our wallet information. We're using our phones as basically a tool to do everything. And the only reason that we can do that is because we have decided to trust Apple with our identity, which is a long way of saying, do you fear that Apple could eat your lunch here, basically, that they're just going to double down on storing everyone's data? And if so, how do you overcome that? If Apple decides they want to do this and really invest, tough day for us at the office. I'm going to be honest about that. Apple are the most brilliant privacy copywriters in the world. And I mean that complimentary and begrudgingly. I wrote my whole senior thesis in history about the history of Apple and private data. And I think what you said is really interesting, which is that if you were to walk up to someone on the street and say, who has more of your data at Facebook or Apple? And I think like the common thought is like Facebook. Everyone's going to be like, did the election stuff. Facebook has nothing. They know they clicked on like one rogue ad. Yeah, exactly. Has my health data. They have my payment. They have credit cards. But we trust them. And it's because they've really invested in that. And Apple, they just used the privacy as iPhone commercial as their legal offense against Epic. And it worked. I mean, the Apple, Apple claim that they need to charge people 30% cut because that's privacy. That's iPhone. It's, it's, it's, it's remarkable. What I'll say is I, I, I, in the spirit of trends, I wrote a whole investor up there called about Apple last fall. And it's my whole argument laying out why they totally could do it. But also why don't think they, they will. And I think there are a couple of reasons. I think one is that Apple is many things. It is currently, not an enterprise security company. And that's what the other part of this is. You know, it's not just the account creation. It's then there's Apple want to proxy data on behalf of a credit card company to five serve. They may be okay with that. Is it, does Apple want to proxy information on behalf of Berkeley do it at IRS at the end of the year? It's something they haven't done yet. More so. I think that Apple is really smart about having the option to go into a space and purposely not doing it so they can do the bigger space. I think Apple cares a lot more about Apple banking and like owning that, then owning like the onboarding ramp to it. Yeah. Like it's similar to like, I think Apple cares more about like selling Apple devices to enterprises and owning mobile device management. So they can claim that they don't own everything that they touch. Yeah. And I think, then the other thing to keep in mind is, Android still is pretty decent market share and globally Android has four more market share. So if you're a company, then even if Apple really goes into this, you're going to need then the vendor for the non-IOS people. And that's something that, you know, just will need to be solved anyway. And I think that's why Apple doesn't present the full solution. I think that they're going to become an increasingly important part of it that we're excited for. I think what Apple is doing with mobile drivers license is fantastic. It's going to be a huge milestone for the company. It's why like, we from the beginning have really looked forward to and built what's going on with Apple, because we can go ahead and fetch them. Yeah. So I think Apple is going to make the identity industry a lot better if they decide to crush us. Yeah. We'll not be on the end of the office. Yeah. I think there are reasons that they're not going to be because the other thing is, Apple as masters of PR, they don't want to onboard the wrong person. Or they don't want to block the right person. So it gets into just waters that I think they prefer to stay out of. Yeah, exactly. It also feels like, you know, the incentives from the consumer perspective or do you want to give your data to the company that's trying to sell phones or do you want to give your data to the company who has a financial incentive to protect your data? And it's sort of like, you've found the right incentives there, at least I from a consumer perspective would rather be giving my data to a company whose incentives are aligned. But company aside, I want to move on to just you as a person and as a founder. And that's sort of what this podcast is ultimately getting at, which is what is it like to be a founder? And I want people who are considering becoming a founder to sort of understand what type of journey they're embarking on. So let's start with, you mentioned that you can't with the business plan in college and then two years later, you actually started the business. Why did you decide that you wanted to start a company in the first place? I did not always think I was going to start a company. I tell a very clean narrative of how I started a company, read a book at night to create and then I called email the author and I started a company and then I went to Stanford and I started a company there. And the dots are really clean and hindsight. They were not clean in real time. It's a great way to put it. And I think it's why, you know, when I speak to people and they say, I really want to start a company, I'm not sure if that's the right mindset in that it's tough. And like I think that's good. I don't say that as a pity thing. I do believe in life that we mostly are what we want and like we choose what we want. I said it more so as like, if you're just doing it because it seems fun, like I think you're in for a bit of a surprise, like I will be when Apple releases I got it from. I think that I was just interested in the space and kind of, I remember back my junior year of school, like I got very interested in GDPR and like I sounded very nerdy, like wall class about it. Could you just explain what GDPR is for the lessons? Yeah, this isn't making me seem fun. But yeah, GDPR, it was past in 2016 and it's Europe, like data privacy laws essentially. And it was, if you're mad about cookie consent banners or if you're happy about them, shout out GDPR. What's interesting is like, GDPR is semi, I think did something that I think did a lot of things wrong. I think it was working in VC and I saw all of these, like when I found like very checkboxy GDPR compliance companies, they kind of bothered me and that like, they're going to make money by locking away data. And like they weren't solving anything too. Like I didn't think that, like if you want to lock away data, like what I, like I started selling a string called TechFights Dobs after the Dobs decision to US and it was to like, help women like who like want to kind of play female health apps, not have to like, give away their data. Like if you want to lock away data, great. Yeah. If you want to lock away like, an SSN in a FinTech app, like, yeah. Yeah. And so that's maybe answered two. And answer three is I've no idea what else I would be doing. And maybe that goes back to answer one. But I spent a lot of time with myself, with my friends, with my therapist trying to discuss why, why kind of, I decided, I don't know what else I'd be doing. It does, I like the challenges it presents. And I never would have guessed half the stuff going into it. Stay with us. Hey, it's Casey Newton, founder and editor of a platformer, a publication about tech, social media, and democracy. And I wanted to let you know that applications are still open for this year's code conference. It's hosted by me and my friends me, like Patel, from the Verge, and Julia Borsten, from CNBC. We're going to be taking the stage with X, slash Twitter, CEO, Linda Yaccarino, GM, CEO, Mary Barra, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, to the Golden Bachelor. He's Gary. And I'm your first Golden Bachelor. We'll tell you what to watch. Also, a few recommendations of stuff you might have missed so far this year. Like Project Greenlight. It's not excellent, but it is a fascinating portrait of making movies and the problem with making movies at this moment. This week on Into It, Vultures Pop Culture Podcast. What does success look like to you? This is something I've been talking to people about. And in a lot of my conversations with founders, first success to them is the idea of raising institutional VC money. And, you know, you did that. You raised $6 million in a seed round from box group and offer it to partners and all these other investors. And then suddenly the success goal changes. And one founder I spoke to recently said, success is an IPO. Just flat out. What would make you happy? What do you consider to be success at footprint? It's a great question. I'll first default to the answers that are earlier, which is like, if we, if footprints successful, I don't need to have to go down. Like I said, it's like to me like this, if you start a company that try to work in climate change, you're like the North Star metric should be like, temperatures rise a lot. Now what's interesting is there can be like financial coming success before we're going to stop. I want to start at the end like that. And then like personally, like my goal footprint is like to do things that we've spoken about. I'd love to like footprint through the data we have somehow can can try to democrat things like detaching disease or it can help women operate more safely in new rules. Yeah. Those are things that I'm very passionate about. I think personal success and company success, I try to be very vulnerable about like, like founder, mental health or things like that. And I want like it's, it's a tough paradox. I have a good friend who I was speaking about recently about the idea of how much of your self worth is tied into the success of the company. And my honest answer is a good amount. Yeah. I do think it's just the thing you spend so much time on that a lot of your worth is tied to it. I think you also, I care really deeply about everyone who works or who took a chance to work on us. Like footprint failing, whatever that means is not like you're failing. It's failing to people who took a vote of confidence in me and what we're doing here. So going back to like what success means, it's a great question. And I have no answer to it. I tell people that, you know, there's one day where I'll be happy enough and they're coming with big enough that like I'll take time off and like I'll walk away and like I could do everything some lines of everything else I'd say. Then maybe true. I think that it is something that we keep changing the line of. It's something I kind of expect that. I think I was catching up with a good friend of mine and I said I think entrepreneurs are some of the most self-confident people in the world and the ones with the least amount of self-love because we do the crazy thing. We said we were going to do and then we tell ourselves that we haven't done anything and we need to go through the next day. And I think if this is a talk about founders and starting company, that is I think where you end up. And I don't say that in glorifying it. And I say that just being honest about how I often think about things. Yeah. You said you worked in VC for a couple years before you started the company. How was that transition of being, I mean, it's mind saying he worked at General Atlantic, large investment firm. You know, I assume you were sort of low in the packing water and just reporting to a lot of other people. And at least when you're an employee at that level, you don't have that much responsibility for other people. How was the transition of suddenly being responsible for multiple people, now 15 human beings and their paychecks? Yeah. It's true. I'd be longing if I said I was great at it. One thing I regret is that I didn't, I'd won robots at G.A. as it was Alex Christy's. And I really love him dearly. We still taxed a lot. And he really taught me a lot about people management and how he treated me. Because you're right. I could not have been lower on the packing. I tell a nice story in pitches. I went to G.A. I helped lead a lot of our work around security problems, identity. Now, when I said that's obviously laughable, it's also kind of true because Alex would hire people and then he would trust them. Yeah. And to me, it's the only experience I knew where Alex hired me and he's like, you're really passionate and possibly smart about these things. Why don't you go do it and tell me you think it's interesting. And that's one thing that we brought here, which is bring on people and feel like, Pedro, you're the best designer I've ever seen. You designed the home pages you think, and then we'll talk about it. Yeah. And that's one thing that I don't, it's feedback we always get in the positive cone, which is like, you give us a lot of autonomy. Part of that's not being smart enough to know how to have an opinion on other things. That's one thing. Alex would do even smaller things where he would send people text on Fridays thanking them for the work that we can do. It's something I try to do and customize. And it's small things, I think, a long way of just noticing that we're all humans. I don't think that there is a Bible of management principles. I mean, there probably are. And, you know, I do think a lot of it, there's just treating people with respect and treating them as humans. The other thing I'll say is, footprint up until July 9th, I'll be like the only non-engineer of the company. And that means that my governor, Alex, a lot of the management really falls on him. Yeah. And like I say, management for me maybe is, you know, speeches at Monday and Friday like company, all hands, or we call them all feet, and kind of, you know, catching up with people. I think it's like a good note though. If you're planning on starting a company, like, I think that, and this is biased because I'm just projecting forward my experience. But I think kind of a, like, a non-technical founder, like, you will have more time to go into that versus, I think it's much tougher kind of for like a, like, the CTM, my governor, Alex, like, he had started a company. He then, like, was pretty senior at another company. Like, he had managed people before. And he does a really good job of it. And I'm very, I benefit tremendously from it. Yeah. And we got a wrap up. So I'll just end on this. What would your advice be to someone who is thinking about starting a company is about to, but isn't sure of themselves? I'm not going to tell you to start it though. Nice. I would say, if it's just, I'm going to start this, and I'm going to recruit a co-founder and we're going to figure out an idea and we're going to raise money. Okay. It's just, there's a lot more things that you have to do. That doesn't mean, I think I'm in the, I think there's a lot of people who encourage, who say, like, lean, start it, like, just go and start and pivot. Yeah. I'm not going to accuse some of being nefarious, but I do think there's a different financial incentive to getting, like, a lot of smart people to start companies, like, one more workout, like, I think I know more stories of people being told to start companies and leaving jobs where they're happy and they're doing a great job. And then coming, not going well, coming, they left being worse off for them, leaving investors being worse off, because that was money that they wrote. I think there's a period where, like, you would just be like, you know what? I'm going to do it. And you'd walk around, like, South Park and SF with, like, like, you know, like, a doc you signed for, like, a seed round, and, like, you'd get signed. Like, two years ago, like, I think it's good that it's tougher enough. Yeah. That said, like, if you want to do it, like, you should totally go for it. Like, if you have high conviction, if you've been spending a lot of time in a space, if you didn't just, like, go on GPT-2, we've soon decided to go to the AI company, like, I support you. And, like, that's great. And, like, get ready for a ride of a lifetime. And, like, I truly mean it. Like, I think it's, it's an incredibly rewarding and experience. But I think if it's, I'm on the fence, there may be reasons for that. And, like, that doesn't mean you won't get there, but there's no rush. What I would say is, like, I feel like there's often, like, presented like this rush of, like, to start something, an investor, a protagonist, you don't want indecision. At the same time, you have your most time before you've started it. Sure. Somebody could build the idea of, like, everything looks competitive until you build the thing. Only more questions will be raised. So, you think at the beginning, they're, like, three open questions. Please answer all three, because that list is only going to grow. That's awesome. That's ended there. Eli is co-founder and CEO of Footprint, joining us from New York. Thank you, Eli. Thanks for having me. Scott, what do you think? I think this is a tough one. I think it's an obvious point. There are a lot of companies in security. The only, and I would need more time with the company, but my sense is, they're going to need to raise a lot of capital and try and sign up and create such a, not only not charge the consumer, but maybe give them some sort of financial, or compensation to get to acquire as many consumers as possible and then basically buy business on the enterprise side. I mean, they're creating a marketplace for security, right? And the only way this marketplace works is if they have enough liquidity of people who sign up for it and enough companies using it such that there's value to the consumer because, oh, I go to Hertz and I can just use my Footprint to expedite the checkout process until there's enough places to accept it. I mean, Apple Pay didn't work for a bunch of years, but they spent so much money to get acceptance. They basically, my guess is kind of bribed the enterprise and said, we'll take the lowest fees or whatever on it. He's going to have to raise a shit on a capital. And if he gets to critical mass, my guess is one of the bigger players, my biom, so it's that they don't have to ask consumers to do this twice. The other thing, this all discremes to me health care and I know there's more regulation there, but it just pulse marketing or sample size of one. Every time I walk into a doctor's office, other than having a strange man, you know, I don't know, stick a glove finger up my ass, which I actually like. I actually like. But other than that, the thing I hate the most is them handing me a fucking clipboard and say, fill out this paperwork you've filled out 300 times. And I mean, I don't even feel, I just lie. I've even started night. I'll even put down. I've had seven heart attacks in the last 24 hours just to see if they read it. And that's good. Yeah, that's good. Or like, anything else we should know? I'm on meth. I'm on meth. That's not funny. That's not funny. That's a very serious topic. Good. But look, the idea, at some point you'd think you'd be able to walk up and say, look here. Approved biometric here. Yes. And they scan your eyes. You know, it's been a great job. It's TSA. I'm totally blown out again. I love big government. Global entry. I don't even put in my passport and they yell, go all the way. And because they've used some sort of facial recognition, they bomb me out. So why can't they have that same sort of facial recognition in the doctor's office where they go, okay, this is, come on in. We know you, we have your medical records. Anyway, the pain point here is obvious. It strikes me that health care is a place that you'd have the most value. And it seems to me like this is a capital play. They've got to raise just a shit ton of capital to create liquidity to basically buy the business for a few years and create liquidity on the consumer and on the enterprise end. And the price is big here. If they get enough people signed up such that Apple Amazon or Signal or some hospital network decides they have to get into the space, they basically just acquire this company for the consumer said and they might pay a big fee for it. But and also I just want to add the reason I'm not a venture capitalist is I hate everything. I hate everything. Yeah. Every business that's pitched to me, I just like, I'm like, that'll never work. So take with a grain of salt. Don't you also think that it's kind of exactly the thing that you have been advocating for on the internet? Like, you know, when we talked about Twitter, verification on social media, like, this is exactly it. And you mentioned the idea of you love big government. Well, most of America doesn't love big government. And the question is, which entity are the American people going to be down to give over their sensitive personal information to? Do you think that they would rather give it to the government? Do you think they'd rather give it to Apple tech company? Or do you think they'd rather give it to a security company? Which is what this company is? Consumers talk a big game about privacy. The CDC knows your HIV status. Google knows everything. Google knows everything about you. We've decided that Google can be trusted to the extent that, I mean, literally, imagine this hack. Your name, your picture, above every Google search chronologically. Imagine that data being released. Everything. Totally fine. You're fine with that. Well, I, the thing is if everyone was released at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem because everyone has their freak flag. But the discussion on privacy is just such a false flag because consumers every day, especially younger consumers, spend so much time forking over everything about them. The question is, are you making the requisite investments to secure that privacy? With meta, you know, they're not. With Twitter, you know, they're not. I would argue big tech. Government number one, I do think people do trust the government mostly around technology and privacy. And they mostly, if you look at their behavior, they mostly trust big tech. So, I don't know if in, where the rubber meets the road, if people are screaming out for a different privacy solution from a small company they've never heard of. And what happens when that company doesn't raise their sea round and goes out of business? And they have to sell the data. Who did they sell the data to? So, Do you have any advice for ELA? Raise a shit on a capital. That's probably not that helpful. That's probably not that helpful. Go raise a shit on a capital. That's not that. Oh, great. Actionable. I would say go really niche, find an area where privacy, where the pain is really large for consumers or the company spends too much time. For example, the rent of car business, that seems to be really interesting because I've been molesting the Earth for the last 30 years, basically renting my brain to rich white guys. That's what I've been doing. That's how I've met a living. The CEO and the CMO in the 90s and the odds, I was running strategy firms and consulting firms. And the CEO and the CMO was, it was a white guy in his 50s and 60s. And they would, one of the many fucked up things about being in the services industry is when you're the servicer, you get to fly to wherever they live. And so, when the CMO's of Samsung and Audi would say, and this happened to me in the same week, we'd love to speak to you, I would have to be an Ingolstadt and Seoul in the same 48-hour period. So, I've been traveling a shit done. I always rent cars, or I used to always rent cars. And one of the big innovations was Hertz had this gold thing, where you see your name. Remember, I don't know if you've done this, it hurts. You see your name on a board. And it says, Galloway F3. And you go to the parking spot F3 and the keys in the car. And I end up with some like white rabbit that infuriates me. It looks like something out of the worst mood, like the lamest guy in the world. And I have to go back to the counter and say, do you know who I am? I'm a baller looking for a random sexual encounter. Give me something a little cooler here. Give me like a convertible cardobo with Rich Grantheon leather. So it's, that was good. You're too young for that. You're too Fernando Lamas, Rich Grantheon leather. It's right over my head. I'm so ridiculous. So ridiculous. Anyways, another big innovation. I cannot for the life of me figure out why I ever need to check into a hotel room. Why do I need to check in? I'm going to tell Lay With My Boys. I'm going to stay in my favorite hotel, the Beverly Hills Hotel. Why do I need to check in? Why don't they send me a QR code on my phone saying, here's the room you're in. I'll get in a joining room for my boys. Here's the QR code. Here's the room number. Knock yourself out. Call us if you need anything. And because they did away with the checkout, now I just leave. If you don't check out, or at least I don't. It's like, I have my credit card. They'll figure out a way to charge me for the three ginger eels. I had a 3 a.m. thinking that would help with my hangover. So I think there's a ton of innovation waiting to happen with shared information or what have you. Long when they say going niche. I don't know if it's rental car companies. The specific crowds out the general. I'd find a very specific industry and try and own this type of application in one very narrow part of the economy and then grow out from there. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our executive producer is Jason Stavers and Catherine Dillon. Mia Silvario is our research lead and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to Profty Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Wednesday for office hours and we'll be back with a fresh take on markets every Monday. And the price. And the price.